Twilight Boy

There is a small-boned boy playing alone in the dust. In the street with an orange cupped in the palm of his hand. His hair blows in time with the chirping of the crickets as his fingers brush words into the earth. His lips move silently, spelling out the words as he goes:

O-N-C-E. THERE WAS. A. B-O-Y. WHO

The boy pauses, unsure. He knows many stories, has written many stories. But this one is special. It is about him.

What does he know? He is eight years old; he does not like to play with the other children. What else? He climbs trees. He lives for stories. He thinks of himself as a twilight boy. He is still not sure what the words mean, but they sound right. Twilight boy.

Soon enough—any moment now, really—a jeep the color of lemongrass will come down the street, swerving, and his brother and two sisters will wear black for a month. His mother for a year. There will be a funeral; not all will attend.

He will be found by the side of the road, by the old man who lives three houses down. The one with bad eyesight. The one whose wife passed away last fall. First, he will see the orange, half peeled, in the middle of the street. Then the boy, curled up on the sidewalk as if he is sleeping. At first, the man will scowl and ask him to please get up, he is in the way. Then, he will shout, poke him with his cane and, with a growing sense of dread, turn the boy—the body—over. He will have no cuts, no bruises, not so much as a scrape. His skin will be blue.

The man will scream.

The autopsy will say that both lungs were punctured by a broken rib. That he suffocated surrounded by air.

There will be a swarm of people, buzzing with I’m sorrys and What a tragedy and I didn’t know him buts. His mother will hand out taut smiles and empty words. She is fine, it is the way of the world, she has lost children before. This last is true; she has, but in her heart, she knows that this one is different. The others did not have names. They were born blue-skinned, empty-lunged, still-hearted. They did not live only to have life ripped away.

She knows she will see him, for years, in the raindrops on the windowsill. In the petals of star-licked violets. On the wind. Her twilight boy, her only dreamer.

~

His brother will find his notebook, filled with new words and penciled questions and stories that begin with once upon a time.

He will not read it, only tuck it into his bookshelf between Hamlet and The Old Man and the Sea.

Some things, though beautiful, cannot linger. Twilight is one. The boy, another.

For now, though, he lives. Peeling the orange in his palm. He rubs a hand across his words, brushing them away. Scraping new ones into the dust.

Once there was a twilight boy, who wanted to tell stories.